… In 2008, Dwight Howard had more endorsement deals than LeBron James. He appeared in seven nationally televised commercials. He disproved the long-held notion that big men beyond Shaq can’t move product. A year later he racked up 3.1 million All-Star votes, still the most ever. In piggybacking the Magic to the ’09 Finals, Howard led the NBA in blocks and rebounds and was fourth in field goal percentage. He was the best defensive player in the league and one of the most efficient scorers. When general managers responded to a 2009 NBA.com poll about which player they would sign to start a franchise, they picked James first, Howard second.
Today, Superman is 31, on the back end of what was supposed to be his prime. Never married, he has five children by five women. He has lost millions of dollars to friends and family. He has at times been estranged from his parents and spurned by his costars. His endorsement portfolio, once brimming with Gatorade and Vitamin Water, McDonald’s and Adidas, Kia and T-Mobile, is down to a sneaker deal with the Chinese sportswear company Peak. He checked in last winter with 151,000 All-Star votes—11,000 fewer than Ersan Ilyasova. Next week Howard will go to training camp with the Hornets, his fifth team in seven seasons, who acquired him over the summer for backups Miles Plumlee and Marco Belinelli.
What happened to Dwight Howard is a question that confounds much of the NBA, himself included. “All of a sudden,” he says, “I went from the good guy to the devil.” He has devoted an inordinate amount of reflection to the subject, reexamining that righteous 18-year-old who left East Point only to endure a punishing cycle of temptation and shame.
… I’m John Urschel, MIT mathematics PhD student and retired NFL offensive lineman, here to answer your questions about math, football, chess, Fiona Apple, and whatever else you may be interested in!
… Insomnia is often the result of not getting enough exercise. If you exercise at night, make sure it’s two to three hours before you go to sleep, since you don’t want to overstimulate your body and brain. If it’s night and you’re feeling awake, try drinking herbal tea anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour before going to bed. I usually don’t have much of a problem going to sleep at night, as I’m pretty tired from that day’s activities.
PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR SLEEP ENVIRONMENT
Create a good pre-sleep routine to relax. Train your body to get into a rhythm by going to bed at a regular time, and turn off all your electronic devices a half hour before you go to sleep. If there’s a TV in your bedroom, consider putting it somewhere else. It’s a bedroom, not a tech cave. My wife doesn’t even allow cell phones near the bed when we sleep.
… After sitting out the second period against Chicago, Jones returned to start the third period, eventually assisting on Scott Hartnell’s overtime winner in a 5-4 Columbus victory that closed out a 34-40-8 record, which ranked second-worst in the Eastern Conference. Every indication was that the player tasked with helping hockey grow across the United States had hit a considerable snag in his development.
Just over 17 months later, Jones is poised to fulfill his destiny and become hockey’s next great star.
“The game meant nothing, and I benched him because I wanted to let him know,” Blue Jackets coach John Tortorella told ESPN.com last week. “It was basically to let him know for the upcoming year, ‘Wake up and take control.'”
Mike Brearley’s new book began as at talk he gave at the London School of Economics in 2012 on what it means to be “in the zone” – the mental state of intense focus and absorption in the task at hand, experienced by athletes and other performers at moments of peak performance. Afterwards, encouraged by friends, he wrote up his thoughts, and the more he wrote, the more he thought. The result is a book that roams far beyond its starting point, without getting anywhere in particular.
Brearley is a psychoanalyst, a career for which he prepared by captaining the England cricket team. Between 1977 and 1981 he led England in 31 Test matches, of which only four were lost. Brearley was a very good though not outstanding batsman. His success as captain was down to his astute tactical brain, and above all to his ability to bring the best out of an England team which included brilliant, sometimes headstrong talents such as David Gower and Ian Botham.
Even though most people think about themselves as primarily visual beings, neuroscience reveals a complex “connectome” of brain cells that connects all of our senses. Try writing a report in a noisy, uncomfortable place with the smells of the office microwave wafting over to your desk, and the importance of other senses becomes clear.
As a neuro-architect, I study how the brain processes all of our senses when we experience design. After all, design isn’t just aesthetic: It also includes the senses of sound, touch, and smell, as well as integrating information we receive from our sense of balance, pressure, pain, and the position of our body within a given place. Together, the perception of all these senses informs our response to architecture—and our attention.
This is particularly true of sound. Studies at the Human Experience Lab at Perkins+Will have revealed how important workplace acoustics are to performance and satisfaction, and that good acoustic design equals good business. Our 2016 study of brainwaves showed how different sound environments are associated with distraction and interruption in the workplace. The results also showed us statistically significant changes in creativity scores associated with different acoustic conditions: Workers reported that they were more creative when office noise was masked by broad frequency “white” noise. (However, the use of white noise may also influence speech intelligibility and attention.) We are now developing new applications that include psychoacoustics—the psychology of sound—in real time to build our understanding of the impact of sound on the human experience.
… The idea is to move toward an “open data set,” taking what Dunham calls “known behaviors” like check-ins to the clubs, classes taken and massages booked — and link it to “unknown” data. That is, Equinox wants to figure out what those behaviors put together say about a given member and how it can serve that member.
In early March, the company built a full “customer profile” system that took various data points from customers to turn them into trackable behaviors that may then serve as predictions.
THE word “smart” is ubiquitous these days. If you believe the hype, smart farms will all employ sensors to report soil conditions, crop growth or the health of livestock. Smart cities will monitor the levels of pollution and noise on every street corner. And smart goods in warehouses will tell robots where to store them, and how. Getting this to work, however, requires figuring out how to get thousands of sensors to transmit data reliably across hundreds of metres. On September 15th, at a computing conference held in Miami, Shyam Gollakota and his colleagues at the University of Washington are due to unveil a gadget that can do exactly that—and with only a fraction of the power required by the best devices currently available.
Dr Gollakota’s invention uses a technology called “LoRa” (from “long range”). Like Wi-Fi, this allows computers to talk to each other with radio waves. Unlike Wi-Fi, though, LoRa is not easily blocked by walls, furniture and other obstacles. That is partly because LoRa uses lower-frequency radio waves than Wi-Fi (900MHz rather than 2.4GHz). Such waves pass through objects more easily. More importantly, LoRa devices make use of a technique called “chirp spread modulation”. That means the frequency of the carrier wave—the basic radio wave, which is then deliberately deformed in order to carry data—rises and falls in a sawtooth pattern. That makes even faint LoRa signals easy to distinguish from background noise, which fluctuates randomly.
About 22 hours before D.C. Public Schools welcomed children back to the classroom, the principal at Janney Elementary School in Tenleytown sent an email to parents notifying them that the school’s artificial turf field would be replaced “due to safety concerns around student injury.”
After children played on the field all spring and summer, officials attached the sign to the field’s fence on Aug. 19. Contact sports would be prohibited until the turf was replaced, the notice said, explaining that the field had failed a hardness test.
Neither the letter to parents nor the sign, however, detailed that more than four months had passed since the field first failed the safety test. It didn’t explain why the field wasn’t replaced before it crossed a critical safety threshold. Nor did the Department of General Services tell the community that ten other fields at local schools and parks had received dangerously out-of-compliance scores during a recent round of testing.
The test failures come as many of the city’s fields are reaching the end of their lifespans, and as a larger debate in D.C. about the safety of crumb rubber and other artificial turf materials is brewing.
The University of New Mexico’s interim president and newly hired athletic director on Tuesday afternoon met with the coaches of the school’s 22 varsity sports and announced an expanded student-athlete drug- and alcohol-testing program will be introduced for Lobo athletics.
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Officials at UNM said Tuesday’s meeting was planned for weeks and is in no way related to a report on NMFishbowl.com. That report, citing unnamed sources, indicated UNM football coach Bob Davie is being investigated for claims of player mistreatment and “allegations about the athlete drug-testing process being compromised.”
The intake of protein plays a vital role in the recovery process following a training session.
The big question however, is whether it is better to get protein from natural wholefood sources or from a protein shake?
Sports Dietitians Australia state that supplements should never be a full replacement for good foods and that eating nutrient rich wholefoods should always be one’s priority.
In regards to the question of protein shakes versus wholefoods the answer differs between athletes as well as training loads.
The stomach is a trainable organ. Just as run training helps strengthen your legs and make your cardiovascular system more efficient, nutrition training helps improve your stomach’s ability to handle the large amount of calories you need to consume during longer runs and races.
Failing to train the stomach as hard as you train your legs, lungs and heart could ruin your race no matter how many miles you run.
Asker Jeukendrup, a leading exercise physiologist and sports nutritionist, illustrates the principle of gut training simply in a 2017 review article in the journal Sports Medicine: with hot-dog eating contests. In July 2017, the Kilian Jornet of competitive eating, Joey Chestnut, ate 72 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes. He accomplished this feat of staggering gluttony through a complex training regimen focused on expanding stomach volume and decreasing perception of fullness. Similarly, trail runners can train their stomachs to maximize absorption and decrease GI distress during activity. And unlike Chestnut, you don’t have to dip hot dogs in water to do it.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Rebecca Penty and Richard Weiss from
… The possibility of being associated with such a feat has garnered the attention of corporate backers. Nike Inc., which has watched Adidas-shod runners set the past five records, is sponsoring Kenya’s Eliud Kipchoge, the 2016 Olympic gold medalist. Running for Adidas AG is countryman Wilson Kipsang, who in 2013 set a world’s fastest time in Berlin (a record broken a year later). Ethiopia’s Kenenisa Bekele, who won last year’s Berlin race with the second-fastest time ever, is working with Vodafone Group Plc, which is testing how wearable technology might boost performance. While none of the companies will say how much they’re spending on their efforts, it’s small compared with the payoff if their runner comes in under two hours, says Tom Vriens, European chief of Navigate Research, a sports and entertainment consultant. “The exposure is absolutely tremendous,” he says. “It’s a fantastic storyline for a marketing campaign.”
Results published in Orthopedics showed the risk for ACL injury among players did not increase with the number of minutes played in a single National Basketball Association game.
To determine the influence of minutes played on injury risk, researchers assessed minutes played in the injury game, during the season and during the career of 83 National Basketball Association (NBA) players who sustained an ACL injury between 1984 and 2015. Researchers also assessed return to play, player efficiency rating and playing time after return. To compare performance data with players who sustained an injury, researchers selected a control group of players without ACL injuries matched based on sex, age, BMI, position and years of experience in NBA.
Compared with the average minutes per game that season or during players’ careers, results showed significantly fewer minutes were played prior to NBA athletes sustaining an ACL injury. Of all injuries, one-third occurred during the first quarter of the season. Researchers noted a 95% rate of return to NBA competition for the season following ACL injury, with significantly more minutes played by players drafted as lottery picks or those who were starters. Researchers found decreased player efficacy ratings among players who returned to play vs. matched controls.
Google Translate, Tussendelinies, Remon Hendriksen from
The use of data in the (professional) football has not been thought out anymore. Brentford FC that was almost completely run based on data, Moneyball expert Billy Beane who advises AZ, the rise of Expected Goals , heart rate measurements and so on. But how do the Eredivisie clubs generally deal with data? We made a tour of the Eredivisie and came with the following results.